
Book ■S'-t 



20 








THE 



Good Gray Poet. 



A VINDICATION. 




NEW YORK: 
BUNCE & HUNTINGTON, 459, BROOME STREET. 

1866. 




/ 



THE 



GrOOD Geat Poet. 






A VINDICATION. 



NEW YORK: 

BUNO" & HUNTINGTON, 459, BROOME STREET. 

1866. 



THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

A VINDICATION 



Washington, D. C, Septemler 3, 1865, 

Nine weeks liave elapsed since the commission of an out- 
rage, to which. I have not till now been able to give my 
attention, but which, in the interest of the sacred cause of free 
letters, and in that alone, I never meant should pass without 
its proper and enduring brand. 

For years past, thousands of people in New York, in 
Brooklyn, in Boston, in New Orleans, and latterly in "Washing- 
ton, have seen, even as I saw two hours ago, tallying, one 
might say, the streets of our American cities, and fit to have 
for his background and accessories, their streaming popula- 
tions and ample and rich facades, a man of striking masculine 
beauty — a poet — powerful and venerable in appearance ; 
large, calm, superbly formed ; oftenest clad in the careless, 
rough, and always picturesque costume of the common people ; 
resembling, and generally taken by strangers for, some great 
mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or grand laborer of one 
kind or another ; and passing slowly in this guise, with non- 
chalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sun- 
light and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero 
he usually wears was, when I saw him just now, the day 
being warm, held for the moment in his hand ; rich light an 
artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered head, majes- 
tic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with the 



4 THE GOOD GKAY POET. 

grandeur of ancient sculpture; I marked the countenance, 
serene, proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with 
noble wrinkles ; the features, massive and handsome, with firm 
blue eyes; the eyebrows and eyelids especially showing that 
fullness of arch seldom seen save in the antique busts ; the 
flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and tempering 
with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but forty- 
flve ; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but 
spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and ex- 
haling faint fragrance ; the whole fopn surrounded with manli- 
ness, as with a nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health and 
vigor, the august charm of the strong. We who have looked 
upon this figure, or listened to that clear, cheerful, vibrating 
voice, might thrill to think, could we but transcend our age, 
that we had been thus near to one of the greatest of the sons 
of men. But Dante stirs no deep pulse, unless it be of hate, as 
he w^alks the streets of Florence; that shabby, one-armed 
soldier, just out of jail and hardly noticed, though he has 
amused Europe, is Michael Cervantes ; that son of a vine-dres- 
ser, whom Athens laughs at as an eccentric genius, before it is 
thought worth while to roar him into exile, is the century- 
shaking ^schylus ; that phantom whom the wits of the seven- 
teenth century think not worth extraordinary notice, and tlie 
wits of the eighteenth century, spluttering with laughter, call 
a barbarian, is Shakespeare; that earth-soiled, vice-stained 
ploughman, with the noble heart and sweet, bright eyes, v/hom 
the good abominate and the gentry patronize — subject now of 
anniversary banquets by gentlemen who, could they wander 
backward from those annual hiccups into Time, would never 
help his life or keep his company — is Robert Bm-ns ; and this 
man, whose grave, perhaps, the next century will cover with 
passionate and splendid honors, goes regarded with careless 
curiosity or phlegmatic composure by his own age. Yet, per- 
haps, in a few hearts he has waked that deep thrill due to the 
passage of the sublime. I heard lately, with sad pleasure, of 
the letter introducing a friend, filled with noble courtesy, and 
dictated by the reverence for genius, which a distiriguished 
English nobleman, a stranger, sent to this American bard. 



A VINDICATION. D 

l^otliing deepens my respect for the beautiful intellect of the 
scholar Alcott, like the bold sentence, " Greater than Plato," 
which he once uttered upon him. I hold it the surest proof of 
Thoreau's insight, that after a conversation, seeing liov/ he in- 
carnated the immense and new spirit of the age, and was the 
compend of America, he came away to speak the electric sen- 
tence, " He is Democracy !" I treasure to my latest hour, with 
swelling heart and springing tears, the remembrance that 
Abraham Lincoln, seeing him for the first time from the win- 
dow of the East Room of the White House as he passed slowly 
by, and gazing at him long with that deep eye which read men, 
said, in the quaint, sweet tone which those who have spoken 
with him will remember, and with a significant emphasis which 
the type can hardly convey — " Well, he looks like a Man !" 
Sublime tributes, great words ; but none too high for their 
object, the author of Leaves of Grass^ Walt Whitman, of 
Brooklyn. 

On the 30th of June last, this true American man and 
author was dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, 
from a clerkship he had held for six months in the Department 
of the Interior. His dismissal was the act of the Hon. James 
Harlan, the Secretary of the Department, formerly a Method- 
ist clergyman, and President of a Western college. 

Upon the interrogation of an eminent oflScer of the G-ov- 
ernment, at whose instance the appointment had, under a 
former Secretary, been made, Mr. Harlan averred that Walt 
Whitman had been in no way remiss in the discharge of his 
duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could learn, his 
conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few 
months of his tenm-e of ofiice, he had been promoted. The sole 
and only cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had 
written the book of poetry entitled Leaves of G?xiss. This book 
Mr. Harlan characterized as "full of indecent passages." The 
author, he said, was " a very bad man," a " Free-Lover." Ar- 
gument being had upon these propositions, Mr. Harlan was, as 
regards the book, utterly unable to maintain his assertions ; and, 
as regards the author, was forced to OAvn that his opinion of him 
had been changed. ^Nevertheless, after this substantial admis- 



6 THE GOOD GKAY POET. 

sion of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke his action. 
Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the 
proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into 
office under Mr. Harlan: but the demand for his reinstate- 
ment was as honorable to the gentleman who made it, as the 
refusal to accede to it was discreditable to the Secretary. 

The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a 
direct consequence of Mr. Harlan's course, was its remission to 
the scurrilous, and in some instances libellous, comment of a por- 
tion of the press. To sum up, an author, solely and only for the 
publication, ten years ago, of an honest book, which no intelli- 
gent and candid person can regard as hurtful to morality, 
was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held up to pub- 
lic contumely by the newspapers. It remains only to be added 
here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon 
assuming the control of the Department, published a maniifeato, 
announcing that it was thenceforth to be governed upon the 
principles of Christian civilization. 

This act of expulsion, and all that it encloses, is the outrage 
to which I referred in the opening sentence of this letter. 

I have had the honor, v/hich I esteem a very high one, 
to know Walt Whitman intimately for several years, and 
am perfectly conversant with the details of his life and history. 
Scores and scores of persons, who know him well, can confirm 
my own report of him, and I have therefore no hesitation in 
saying that the scandalous assertions of Mr. Harlan, derived 
from whom I know not, as to his being a bad man, a Free- 
Lover, &c., belong to the category of those calumnies at which, 
as Napoleon said, innocence itself is confounded. A better man 
in all respects, or one more irreproachable in his relations to the 
other sex, lives not upon this earth. His is the great goodness, 
the great chastity of spiritual strength and sanity. I do not 
believe that from the hour of his infancy, when Lafayette held 
him in his arms, to the present liour, in which he bends over the 
last wounded and dying of the war, that any one can say aught 
of him that does not consort with the largest and truest manli- 
ness. I am perfectly av»^are of the miserable lies vdiich have 
been put into circulation respecting him, of which the story of 



A VIIS^DICATIOIT. 7 

his dishonoring an invitation to dine with Emerson, by appear- 
ing at the table of the Astor House in a red shirt, and with the 
manners of a rowdy, is a mild specimen. I know, too, the in- 
ferences drawn by wretched fools, who, because they have seen 
him riding upon the top of an omnibus ; or at Pfaff 's restaurant ; 
or dressed in rough clothes suitable for his purposes, and only 
remarkable because the wearer was a man of genius ; or mixing 
freely and lovingly, like Lucretius, like Rabelais, like Francis 
Bacon, like Eembrandt, like all great students of the world, 
with low and equivocal and dissolute persons, as well as with 
those of a different character, must needs set him down as a 
brute, a scallawag, and a criminal. Mr. Harlan's allegations 
are of a piece with these. If I could associate the title with a 
really great person, or if the name of man were not radically 
superior, I should say that for solid nobleness of character, for 
native elegance and delicacy of soul, for a courtesy which is the 
very passion of thoughtful kindness and forbearance, for his 
tender and paternal respect and manly honor for woman, for 
love and heroism carried into the pettiest details of life, and for 
a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes the civili- 
ties of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whit- 
man deserves to be considered the grandest gentleman that 
treads this continent. I know well the habits and tendencies 
of his life. They are all simple, sane, domestic ; worthy of him 
as one of an estimable family and a member of society. He is 
a tender and faithful son, a good brother, a loyal friend, an 
ardent and devoted citizen. He has been a laborer, workhig 
successively as a ftirmer, a carpenter, a printer. He has 
been a stalwart editor of the Republican party, and often, 
in that powerful and nervous prose of which lie is master, 
done yeoman's service for the great cause of human liberty 
and the imperial conception of the indivisible Union. He 
has been a visitor of prisons ; a protector of fugitive slaves ; 
a constant voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, 
from the beginning of the war to the present time ; a brother 
and friend through life to the neglected and the forgotten, 
the poor, the degraded, the criminal, the outcast; turning away 
from no man for his guilt, nor woman for her vileness. His is 



8 THE GOOD GRAY POET. 

the strongest and truest compassion I have ever known. I re- 
member here the anecdote told me by a witness, of his meeting 
in a by-street in Boston a poor ruffian, one whom he had known 
well as an innocent child, now a full-grown youth, vicious far 
beyond his years, flying to Canada from the pursuit of the po- 
lice, his sin-trampled features bearing marks of the recent 
bloody brawl in 'New York in which, as he supposed, he had 
killed some one ; and having heard his hurried story, freely con- 
fided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from the bad even by 
his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil feel- 
ing for this ruined being, and with a love which makes me think 
of that love of God which deserts not any creature, quietly at 
parting, after assisting him from his means, held him for a mo- 
ment, with his arm around his neck, and, bending to the face, 
horrible and battered and prematurely old, kissed him on the 
cheek ; and the poor hunted wretch, perhaps for the first time 
in his low life, receiving a token of love and compassion like a 
touch from beyond the sun, hastened away in deep dejection, 
sobbing and in tears. It reminds me of the anecdotes Yictoi 
Hugo, in his portraiture of Bishop Myriel, tells, under a thin 
veil of fiction, of Charles MioUes, the good Bishop of Rennes. 
— I know not what talisman Walt Whitman carries, unless it be 
an unexcluding friendliness and goodness which is felt upon 
his approach like magnetism ; but I know that in the subterra- 
nean life of cities, among the worst roughs, he goes safely ; and 
I could recite instances where hands that, in mere wantonness 
of ferocity, assault anybody, raised against him, have of their own 
accord been lowered almost as quickly, or, in some cases, been 
dragged promptly down by others ; this, too, I mean, when he 
and the assaulting gang were mutual strangers. I have seen 
singular evidence of the mysterious quality which not only 
guards him, but draws to him with intuition, rapid as light, 
simple and rude people, as to their natm-al mate and friend. I 
remember, as I passed the White House with him one evening, 
the startled feeling with which I saw the soldier on guard there 
— a stranger to us l)oth, and with something in his action that 
curiously proved that he was a stranger — suddenly bring his 
musket to the " present," in military salute to him, quickly min- 



A VESTDICATION. 



9 



gling witli this respect due to liis colonel, a gesture of greetiug 
with tlie right hand as to a comrade ; grinning, meanwhile, good 
fellow, with shy, spontaneous affection and deference ; liis ruddy, 
broad face glowing in the flare of the lampions. I remember, 
on another occasion, as I crossed the street with him, the driver 
of a street car, a stranger, stopping the conveyance, and invit- 
ing him to get on and ride with him. Adventures of this kind 
are frequent, and, " 1 took a fancy to you," or, " You look like 
one of my style," is the common explanation he gets upon then* 
occurrence. It would be impossible to exaggerate the personal 
adhesion and strong, simple affection given him, in numerous 
instances on sight, by multitudes of plain persons— sailors, me- 
chanics, di-ivers, soldiers, farmers, sempstresses, old people of 
the past generation, mothers of families— those powerful, unlet- 
tered persons, among whom, as he says in his book, he has 
gone freely, and who never in most cases even suspect as an 
author him whom they love as a man, and who loves them in 
return.— His intellectual influence upon many young men and 
^omen— spirits of the morning sort, not willing to belong to 
that intellectual colony of G-reat Britain which our literary 
<3lasses compose, nor helplessly tied like them to the old forms— 
I note as kindred to that of Socrates upon the youth of ancient 
Attica, or Kaleigh upon the gallant young England of his day. 
It is a power at once liberating, instructhig, and insph'ing.— His 
conversation is a university. Those who have heard him in 
some roused hour, when the full afflatus of his spirit moved 
him, will agree with me that the grandeur of talk was accom- 
phshed. He is known as a passionate lover and powerful critic 
of the great music and of art. He is deeply cultured by some 
of the best books, especially the Bible, which he prefers above 
all other great literature ; but principally by contact and com- 
munion with things themselves, which literature can only mir- 
ror and celebrate. He has travelled through most of the United 
States, intent on comprehending and absorbing the genius and 
meaning of his country, that he might do his best to start a 
literature worthy of her, sprung from her own polity, and^ tal- 
lying her own unexampled magnificence among the nations. 
To the same end, he has been a long, patient, and laborious 



10 THE GOOD GRAY POET. 

student of life, mixing intimately with all varieties of experience 
and men, witli curiosity and with love. He has given his 
thought, his life, to this beautiful ambition, and, still young, he 
has grown gray in its service. He has never married; like 
Giordano Bruno, he has made Thought in the service of his 
fellow-creatures his hella donna^ his best beloved, his bride. His 
patriotism is boundless. It is no intellectual sentiment ; it is a 
personal passion. He performs with scrupulous fidelity and 
zeal, the duties of a citizen. For eighteen years, not missing 
once, his ballot has dropped on every national and local election 
day, and his influence has been ardently given, for the good 
cause. Of all men I know, his life is most in the life of the 
nation. I remember, when the first draft was ordered, at a 
time when he was already performing an arduous and perilous 
duty as a volunteer attendant upon the wounded in the field 
— a duty which cost him the only illness he ever had in his 
life, and a very severe and dangerous illness it was, the result 
of poison absorbed in his devotion to the worst cases of the 
hospital gangrene; and when it would have been the easiest 
thing in the world to evade duty, for though then only forty- 
two or three years old, and subject to the draft, he looked a 
hale sixty, and no enrolling officer would have paused for an 
instant before his gray hair — 1 remember, I say, how anxious 
and careful he was to get his name put on the enrolment lists, 
that he might stand his chance for martial service. This, too, 
at a time when so many gentlemen were skulking, dodging, 
agonizing for substitutes, and practising every conceivable de- 
vice to escape military duty. What music of speech, though 
Cicero's own — ^what scarlet and gold superlatives could adorn 
or dignify this simple antique trait of private heroism ? — I re- 
call his love for little children, for the young, and for very 
old pei^ons, as if the dawn and the evening twilight of life 
awakened his deepest tenderness. I recall the aifection for 
him of numbers of young men, and invariably of all good 
women. Who, knowing him, does not regard him as a man 
of the highest spiritual culture ? I have never known one of 
greater and deeper religious feeling. To call one like him 
good, seems an impertinence. In om- sweet country phrase. 



A VE^DICATION. 11 

he is one of God's men. And as I write these hurried and 
broken memoranda — as his strength and sweetness of nature, 
his moral health, his rich hnmor, his gentleness, his serenity, 
his charity, his simple-heartedness, his courage, his deep and 
varied knowledge of life and men, his calm wisdom, his singu- 
lar and beautiful boy-innocence, his personal majesty, his rough 
scorn of mean actions, his magnetic and exterminating anger 
on due occasions — all that I have seen and heard of him, the 
testimony of associates, the anecdotes of friends, the remem- 
brance of hours with him that should be immortal, the traits, 
lineaments, incidents of his life and being — as they come crowd- 
ing into memory — his seems to me a character which only the 
heroic pen of Plutarch could record, and which Socrates him- 
self might emulate or envy. 

This is the man whom Mr. Harlan charges with having 
written a bad book. I might ask, How long is it since bad 
books have been the flower of good hves ? How long is it since 
grape-vines produced thorns or fig-trees thistles ? But Mr. 
Harlan says the book is bad because it is " full of indecent 
passages." This allegation has been brought against Leaves 
of Grass before. It has been sounded loud and strong by 
many of the literary journals of both continents. As criticism 
it is legitimate. I may contemn the mind or deplore the moral 
life in which such a criticism has its source ; still, as criticism 
it has a right to existence. But Mr. Harlan, j^assing the limits 
of opinion, inaugurates punishment. He joins the band of the 
hostile verdict ; he incarnates their judgment ; then, detaching 
himself, he proceeds to a solitary and signal vengeance. As far 
as he can have it so, this author, for havincr written his book 
shall starve. He shall starve, and his name shall receive a brand. 
This is the essence of Mr. Harlan's action. It is a dark and 
serious step to take. Upon what grounds is it taken ? 

I have carefully counted out from "Walt Whitman's poetry 
the lines, perfectly moral to me, whether ^dewed in themselves 
or in the light of their sublime intentions and purport, but upon 
which ignorant and indecent persons of respectability base their 
sweeping condemnation of the whole work. Taking Leaves of 
Grass, and the recent small volume, D?''um-Taj)s (which was in 



12 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

Mr. Harlan's possession), there are in the whole about nine 
thousand lines or verses. From these, including matter which 
I can hardly imagine objectionable to any one, but counting 
every thing which the most malignant virtue could shrink from, 
I have culled eighty lines. Eighty lines out of nine thousand ! 
It is a less proportion than one iinds in Shakesj)eare. Upon this 
so slender basis, rests the whole crazy fabric of American and 
Em'opean slander, and the brutal lever of the Secretary. 

ISTow, what by competent authority is the admitted character 
of the book in which these lines occur ? For, though it is more 
than probable that Mr. Harlan never heard of the work till the 
hour of his explorations in the Department, the intellectual 
hemispheres of Great Britain and America have rung with it 
from side to side. It has received as extensive a critical 
notice, I suppose, as has ever been given to a volume. Had 
it been received only with indifference or derision, I should 
not have been surprised. In an age in which few breathe the 
atmosphere of the grand literature — which forgets the superb 
books and thinks Bulwer moral, and Dickens great, and Thack- 
eray a real satirist — which gives to Macaulay the laurel due to 
Herodotus, and to Tennyson the crown reserved for Homer, 
and in which the chairs of criticism seem abandoned to squirts 
and pedagogues and monks — a mighty poet has little to expect 
from the literary press save unconcern and mockery. But even 
under these hard conditions, the tremendous force of this poet 
has achieved a relative conquest, and the tone of the press 
denotes his book as not merely great, but illustrious. Even 
the copious torrents of abuse which have been lavished upon it, 
have in numerous instances taken the form of tribute to its 
august and mysterious power, being in fact identical with that 
still vomited upon Montaigne and Juvenal. On the other 
hand, eulogy, very lofty and from the highest som-ces, has 
spanned it with sunbows. Emerson, our noblest scholar, a 
name to which Christendom does reverence, a critic of piercing 
insight and full comprehension, has pronounced it " the most 
extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet 
contributed." How that austere and rare spirit, Thoreau, re- 
garded it, may be partly seen by his last posthumous volume. 



A VINDICATION. 1^ 



He thoiiglit of it, I have heard, with measureless esteem,' rank- 
ing it with the vast and gorgeous conceptions of the Oriental 
bards. It has been reported to me, that unpublished letters, 
received in this country from some of Europe's greatest, an- 
nounce a similar verdict. The North American Quarterly 
Review, unquestionably the highest organ of American letters, 
in the course of a eulogistic notice of the work, remarking upon 
the passages which Mr. Harlan has treated as if they were novel 
in literature, observes : " There is not anything, perhaps (in the 
book), which modern usage would stamp as more indelicate 
than are some passages in Homer. There is not a word in it 
meant to attract readers by its grossness, as there is in half the 
literature of the last century, which holds its place unchallenged 
on the tables of our drawing-rooms." The London Disjpatch, 
in a review written by the Eev. W. J. Fox, one of the mcst dis- 
tinguished clergymen in England, after commending the poems 
for "their strength of expression, their fervor, their hearty 
wholesomeness, their originahty and freshness, their singular 
harmony," &c., says that, ''in the unhesitating frankness of a 
man who dares to call simplest things by their plain names, 
conveying also a large sense of the beautiful," there is involved 
" a clearer conception of what manly modesty really is, than in 
any thins: we have in all conventional forms of word, deed, or 
act, so far known of;" and concludes by declaring that " the 
author will soon make his way into the confidence of his read- 
ers, and his poems in time will become a pregnant text-book, 
from which quotations as sterling as the minted gold will be 
taken and applied to every form of the inner and the outer 
life." The London Leader, one of the foremost of the British 
literary journals, in a review which more nearly approaches 
perception of the true character and purport of the book, than 
any I have seen, has the following sentences : " Mr. Emerson rec- 
"ognized the first issue of the Leaves, and hastened to welcome 
" the author, then totally unknown. Among other things, said 
"Emerson to the new avatar, ' I greet you at the beginning of 
" a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground 
" somewhere for such a start: The last clause was, however, 
" overlooked entirely by the critics, who treated the new author 



14 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

" as one self-educated, yet in the rough, unpolished, and owing 
"nothing to instruction. The authority for so treating the 
" author was derived from himself, who thus described, in one 
" of his poems, his person, character, and name, having omitted 
"the last from the title-page : — . 

* Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, 
Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual,' — 

" and in various other passages, confessed to all the vices, as well 
" as the virtues of man. All this, with intentional wrong-head- 
"edness, was attributed by the sapient reviewers to the individ- 
"nal writer, and not to the subjective-hero supposed to be writ- 
" ing. Notwithstanding the word ' kosmos,' the writer was taken 
"to be an ignorant man. Emerson perceived at once that 
"there had been a long foreground somewhere or somehow ; — 
"not so they. Every page teems with knowledge, with infor- 
"mation ; but they saw it not, because it did not answer their 

"purpose to see it The poem in whidi the word '•kos- 

"mos ' appears explains in fact the whole mystery — nay, the 
" word itself explains it. The poem is nominally upon himself, 
"but really includes everybody. It begins : — 

'I celebrate myself; 

And what I assume, you shall assume ; 

For every atom belonging to m«, as good belongs to yon.' 

"In a word, "Walt Whitman rejpresents the Kosmical mmi — he 
^'is the A.-DAMCQ of the nineteenth century — not an individual, 
^'hid Mankind. As such, in celebrating himself, he proceeds to 
" celebrate universal humanity in its attributes, and accordingly 
"commences his dithyramb vv^ith the five senses, beginning with 
"that of smell. Afterwards, he deals v^^ith the intellectual, 
"rational, and moral powers, showing throughout his treatment 
"an intimate acquaintance with Kant's transcendental method, 
"and perhaps including in his development the whole of the 
"German school, down to Hegel — at any rate, as inteq32*eted by 
"Cousin and others in France, and Emerson in the United 
" States. He certainly includes Fichte, for he mentions the Ego- 



A VINDICATION. 15 

"tist as the only true pliilosoplier, and consistently identifies 
" himself not only with every man, but with the universe and its 
" Maker ; and it is in doing so that the strength of his descrip- 
"tion consists. It is from such an ideal elevation that he looks 
*^down on Good and Evil, regards them as equal, and extends to 

" them the like measure of equity Instead, therefore, of 

••'regarding these Leaves of Grass as a marvel, they seem to us 
" as the most natural product of the American soil. They are 
" certainly filled with an American spirit, breathe the American 
"air, and assert the fullest American freedom." The passages 
characterized by the Secretary as " indecent " are, adds the 
Leader^ " only so many instances adduced in support of a 
"philosophical principle ; not meant for obscenity, but for scien- 
"tific examples, introduced as they might be in any legal, med- 
"ical, or philosophical book, for the purpose of instruction." 

I could multiply these excerpts ; but here are sufficient 
specimens of the competent judgments of eminent scholars and 
divines, testifying to the intellectual and moral grandeur of this 
work. Let it be remembered that there is nothing in the 
book that in one form or another is not contained in all great 
poetic or universal literature. It has nothing either in quan- 
tity or quality so offensive as everybody knows is in Shakes- 
peare. All that this poet has done is to mention, without 
levity, without low language, very seriously, often devoutly, 
always simply, certain facts in the natural history of man and 
of life ; and sometimes, assuming their sanctity, to use them in 
illustration or imagery. Far more questionable mention and 
use of these facts are common to the greatest literature. Shall 
the presence in a book of eighty lines, similar in character to 
what every great and noble poetic book contains, be sufficient 
to shove it below even the lewd writings of Petronius Arbiter, 
the dirty dramas of Shirley, or the scrofulous fiction of Louvet 
de Couvray — to lump it in with the anonymous lascivious trash 
spawned in holes and sold in corners, too witless and disgusting 
for any notice but that of the police — and to entitle its author 
to treatment such as only the nameless wretches of the very- 
sewers of authorship ought to receive ? 

If, rising to the utmost cruelty of conception, I can dare add 



16 THE aOOD GEAY POET. 

to the calamities of genius a misery so degrading and extreme 
as to imagine the great anthers of the world condemned to 
clerkships under Mr. Harlan, I can at least mitigate that 
dream of wretchedness and insult by adding the fancy of their 
fate under the action of his principles. Let me suppose them 
there, and he still magnifying the calling of the Secretary into 
that of the literary headsman. He opens the great book of 
Genesis. Everywhere " indecent passages. " The mother 
hushes the child, and bids him skip as he reads aloud that first 
great history. It cannot be read aloud in " drawing-rooms " 
by " gentlemen " and "ladies." The freest use of language, 
the plainest terms, frank mention of forbidden subjects; the 
story of Onan; of Hagar and Sarai ; of Lot and his daughters; 
of Isaac, Rebekah, and Abimelech ; of Jacob and Leah ; of 
Keuben and Bilhah ; of Potiphar's wife and Joseph ; tabooed 
allusion and statement everywhere ; no veils, no euphemism, no 
delicacy, no meal in the mouth anywhere. Out with Moses ! 
The cloven splendor on that awful brow shall not save him. — 
Mr. Harlan takes up the ILiad and the Odysseij, The loves of 
Jupiter and Juno; the dalliance of Achilles and Patroclus 
with their women; the perfectly frank, undraped reality of 
Greek life and manners naively shown without regard to the feel- 
ings of Christian civilizees — horrible ! Out with Homer ! — Here 
is Lucretius : Mr. Harlan opens the De Rerum Natiira^ and reads 
the vast, benign, majestic lines, sad with the shadow of the un- 
intelligible universe upon them ; sublime with the tragic prob- 
lems of the Infinite ; august with their noble love and compas- 
sion for mankind. But what is this \ " Tit quasi transactis 
scBjpe omnihus rebus^^^ &c. And this : " More ferarum^ quad- 
rupedumque magis ritu^'' &c. And this : " Nam. mulier j^rc*- 
Tiibet se concipere atque Tepugnajt^'' &c. And this: " Quod 
petiere^ premimt arete, faciuntque dolorem^^ &c. Enough. 
Fine language, fine illustrations, fine precepts, pretty decency ! 
Out with Lucretius ! Out with the chief poet of the Tiber side ! 
— Here is ^schylus : a dark magnificence of cloud, all rough 
with burning gold, which thunders and drips blood! The 
Greek Shakespeare. The gorgeous and terrible iEschylus! 
What is this in the Prometheus about Jove and lo ? "What 



A VINDICATION^. 17 

sort of detail is that wliicli, at the distance of ten years, I re- 
member amazed Mr. Buckley as he translated the Agamem- 
non f What kind of talk is this in the Chcejphori^ in The 
SujjpUants, and in the fragments of the comic drama of The 
Argians ? Out with ^schylus ! — Here is the sublime book of 
Ezekiel. Ail the Hebrew grandeur at its fullest is there. But 
look at this blurt of coarse words, hurled direct as the prophet- 
mouth can hurl them — this familiar reference to functions and 
organs voted out of language — this bread for human lips baked 
with ordure — these details of the scortatory loves of Aholah 
and Aholibamah. Enough. Dismiss this dreadful majesty of 
Hebrew poetry. He has no " taste.-' He is " indecent." Out 
with Ezekiel! — Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages 
of the Inferno. What is this about the she-wolf Can Grande 
will kill ? What picture is this of stnmipet Thais ? — ending 
with the lines — 

" Taida e, la puttana che i-ispose 

Al drudo siio, quando disse: Ho io grazie 
G-randi appo te ? Anzi meravigliose." 

What is thie, also, in the eighteenth canto ? — 

" Quivi venimmo, e quindi giil nel fosso 
Vidi gente attuffata in imo stereo, 
Che dagli uman privati parea mosso : 
E mentre ch' io la giti con I'occliio cerco, 
Vidi un col capo si di merda lordo, 
Che non parea s'era laico o cherco." 

What is this line at the end of the twenty-fii'st canto, which 
even John Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante 
did uot flinch from writing: ? — 

"Ed egli avea del cul fatto trorabetta." 

And look at these lines in the twenty-eighth canto : — 

"Gia reggia, per mezzul perdere o Mia 
Com' io vidi un, cosi non si pertugia, 
Eotto dal mento insin dove si triilla.'" 

That will do. Dante, too, has " indecent passages." Out with 
Dante! — Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian land- 



18 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

scape, the picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last 
tragic immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole overarching 
sky of Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable 
"indecency." Instead of the virtuous fiction of the tansy- 
bed. Job actually has the indelicacy to state how man is born — 
even mentions the belly ; talks about the gendering of bulls 
and the miscarriage of cows ; uses rank idioms ; and in the 
thirty-first chapter especially, indulges in a strain of thought 
and expression which it is amazing does not bring down upon 
him, even at this late date, the avalanches of our lofty and pure 
Reviews. Here is certainly " an immoral poet.*' Out with 
Job ! — Here is Plutarch, prince of biographers, and Herodotus, 
flower of historians. What have we now ? Traits of character 
not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of man- 
ners, minute details of customs, which our modern historical 
dandies would never venture upon recording. Out with Plu- 
tarch and Herodotus ! — Here is Tacitus. What statement of 
crimes that ought not to be liinted ! Does the man gloat over 
such things ? What dreadful kisses are these of Agrippina to 
Nero — the mother to the son ! Out with Tacitus ! — and since 
there are books that ought to be publicly burned, by all means 
let the stern grandeur of that rhetoric be lost in flame. — Here 
is Shakespeare: '^ indecent passages" everywhere — every 
drama, every poem thickly inlaid with them; all that men 
do displayed ; sexual acts treated lightly, jested about, men- 
tioned obscenely ; the language never bolted ; slang, gross 
puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare! — 
Here is the Canticle of Canticles : beautiful, voluptuous poem 
of love literally, whatever be its mystic significance ; glowing 
with the color, odorous with the spices, melodious with the 
voices of the East ; sacred and exquisite and pure with the 
burning chastity of passion which completes and exceeds the 
snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but wliat to the Secre- 
tary ? Can he endure that the female form should stand thus 
in a poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor? Look 
at these voluptmous details, this expression of desire, this amo- 
.rous tone and glow, this consecration and perfume lavished 
upon the sensual. ISTo ! Out with Solomon 1 — Here is Isaiah. 



A VmDICATIOl^. 19 

The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness, like the eternal 
roar of God above the guilty world, utters coarse words. 
Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime denunciation, 
coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent allusion, flash upon 
the sight, like gross imagery in a midnight landscape. Out 
with Isaiah ! — Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those 
virtuous pages of the unflinching reporter of Man ; the soul 
all truth and daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, reality, 
eyesight. A few glances will sufiice. Cant and vice and 
sniffle liave groaned over these pages before. Out with Mon- 
taigne ! — Here is Hafiz, the Anacreon of Persia, but more : a 
banquet of wine in a garden of roses, the nightingales singing, 
the laughing revellers high with festal joy ; but a heavenly 
flame burns on every brow ; a tone not of this sphere is in all 
the music, all the laughter, all the songs ; a light of the Infi- 
nite trembles over eveiy chalice and rests on every flower; 
and all the garden is divine. Still, wlien Hafiz cries out, " Bring 
me wine, and bring the famed veiled beauty, the Princess of 
the brothel," &c., or issues similar orders, Mr. Harlan, whose 
virtue does not understand or endure such metaphors, must 
deal sternly with this kosmic man of Persia. Out with Hafiz ! 
— Here is Yirgil, ornate and splendid poet of old Eome ; a 
master with a greater pupil, Alighieri ! a bard above whose 
ashes Boccaccio kneels a trader, and arises a soldier of man- 
kind; but he must lose those fadeless chaplets, the undying 
green of a noble fame ; for here in tbe jEneid is ^^ Dixerat ; 
et niveis Mne atque hino Diva lacertis^'' &c., and liere in the 
Georgics is '^ Quo rajyiat sitiens Yenere77i, interiiisque recon- 
dat^^ &c., and there are other verses like these. Out with 
Yirgil ! — Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem in prose, the 
Conj%ujial Love — to me, a temple, though in ruins ; the sacred 
fane, clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a great though 
broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains all liere ? 
"Lewd," "sensual," "lecherous," "coarse," "licentious," &c. 
Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from 
the tobacco-juice of au expectorating and disdainful virtue. 
Out with Swedenborg ! — Here is Goethe : the horrified squeal- 
ing of prudes is not yet silent over pages of Wilkelm Meisier / 



20 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

that higli and chaste book, the Elective Affinities^ still pumps up 
oaths from clergymen ; Walpurgis has hardly ceased its uproar 
over Fcmst. Out with Goethe ! — Here is Byron : grand, dark 
poet ; a great spirit — a soul like the ocean ; generous lover of 
America ; fiery trumpet of liberty ; a sword for tlie human 
cause in G-reece ; a torch for the human mind in Gain / a life 
that redeemed its every fault by taking a side, which was the 
human side; tempest of scorn in his first poem, tempest of scorn 
and laughter in his last poem, only against the things that wi'ong 
man ; vast bud of the Infinite that Death alone prevented from 
its vaster flower ; immense, seminal, electrical, dazzling By- 
ron. — But Bejppo — O ! But Don Juan — O fie ! ISTot to mention 
the Countess Guiccioli — ah, me ! Prepare quickly the yellow 
envelope, and out with Byron ! — Here is Cervantes : open Don 
Quixote^ paragon of romances, highest result of Spain, best and 
sufficient reason for her life among the nations, a laughing nov- 
el which is a weepiug poem. But talk such as this of Sancho 
Panza and Tummas Oecial under the cork-trees, and these coarse 
stories and bawdy words and this free and gross comedy — is it 
to be endured 1 Out with Cervantes ! — Here is another, a sun 
of literature, moving in a vast orbit with dazzling plenitudes 
of power and beauty ; the one only modern European poet and 
novelist worthy to rank with the first ; permanent among the 
fleeting ; a demigod of letters among the pigmies ; a soul of the 
antique strength and sadness, worthy to stand as tlie represen- 
tative of the high thought and hopes of the nineteenth century 
— ^Yictor Hugo ! Now open Les Miserables. See the great 
passages which the American translator softens and the Eng- 
lish translator tears away. Open this other book of his, William 
Shahesj)eare^ a book with only one grave fault, the omission of 
the vv^ords "A Poem" from the title-page ; a book which is the 
courageous arch, the comprehending sky of criticism, but which 
no American publisher will dare to issue, or, if he does, will ex- 
purgate. Out with Hugo, of course ! — Here is Juvenal, terri- 
ble and splendid fountain of all satire ; inspiration of all just 
censure ; exemplar of all noble rage at baseness ; satirist and 
moralist sublimed into the poet ; the scowl of the unclouded 
noon above the low streets of folly and of sin. But what he 



A ymDICATIOK. 21 

withers, he also sho^s. The sun-stroke of his poetry reveals 
what it kills. Juvenal tells all. His fidelity of exposure is 
frio-htfal. Mr. Harlan would make short work of him. Out 
with Juvenal ! — Open the divine Apocalypse. What v/ords are 
these among the thunderings and lightnings and voices ? 
Is this a poem to be read aloud in parlors (for such appears to 
be the test of propriety and purity) ? At least, John might 
have been a little more choice in language. Some of these 
texts are "indecent." Yes, indeed! John must go. — Here 
is Spenser. Encyclopsedic poet of the visioned chivalry. It 
is all there. Amadis, Esplandian, Tirante the White, Palm- 
erin of England, all those Paladin romances were but the 
leaves : this is the flower. A lost dream of valor, chastity, 
courtesy, glory — a dream that marks an age of human history 
— ^glimmers here, far in these depths, and makes this unex- 
plored obscurity divine. " But is the Faery Queen such 
a book as you would wish to put into the hands of a lady ?" 
What a question ! Has it not been expurgated ? Out with 
Spenser ! — Here is another, a true soldier of the human eman- 
cipation; one who smites amidst uproars of laughter; the 
master of Titanic farce ; a whirlwind and earthquake of 
derision — Rabelais. A nice one for Mr. Harlan! One 
glimpse at the ehapter which explains why the miles 
lengthen as you leave Paris, or at the details of the birth and 
nurture of Gargantua, will suffice. Out with Rabelais — 
out with the great jester of France, as Lord Bacon calls 
him ! — And here is Lord Bacon himself, in one of whose 
pages you may read, done from the Latin by Spedding 
into a magnificent golden thunder of English, the absolute 
defence of the free spirit of the great authors, coupled with 
stern rebuke to the spirit that would pick and choose, as 
dastard and effeminate. Out with Lord Bacon! E'ot him 
only, not these only, not only the writers are under the ban. 
Here is Phidias, gorgeous sculptor in gold and ivory, giant 
dreamer of the Infinite in marble ; but he will not use the fig- 
leaf. Here is Rembrandt, who paints the Holland landscape, 
the Jew, the beggar, the bm'gher, in lights and glooms of Eter- 
nity ; and his pictures have been called " indecent." Here is 



22 THE GOOD OEAY POET. 

Mozart, liis music rich with the sumptuous color of all sunsets ; 
and it has been called " sensual." Here is Michael Angelo, 
who makes art tremble with a new and strange afflatus, and 
gives Europe novel and sublime forms that tower above the 
centuries, and accost the Greek ; and his works have been called 
" bestial." Out with them all ! — ]N"ow, except Yirgil for vassal- 
age to literary models, and for grave and sad falsehood to 
liberty ; except Groethe for his lack of the final ecstasy of self- 
surrender which completes a poet, and for coldness to the great 
mother — one's country ; except Spenser for his remoteness, and 
Byron for his immaturity, and there is not one of those I have 
named that does not belong to the first order of human intel- 
lect. But no need to make discriminations here ; they are all 
great ; they have all striven ; they have all served. Moses, 
Homer, Lucretius, ^schylus, Ezekiel, Dante, Job, Plutarch, 
Herodotus, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Solomon, Isaiah, Montaigne, 
Hafiz, Yirgil, Swedenborg, Goethe, Byron, Cervantes, Hugo, 
Juvenal, John, Spenser, Rabelais, Bacon, Phidias, Rembrandt, 
Mozart, Angelo : — these are among the demi-gods of human 
thought ; the souls that have loved and suffered for the race ; 
the light-bringers, the teachers, the lawgivers, the consolers, 
the liberators, the inspired inspirers of mankind ; the noble 
and gracious beings who, in the service of humanity, have 
borne every cross and earned every crown. There is not one 
of them that is not sacred in the eyes of thoughtful men. But 
not one of them does the rotten taste and morals of the nine- 
teenth century spare ! I^ot one of them is qualified to render 
work for bread under this Secretary ! Do I err ? Do I exag- 
gerate ? I write without access to the books I mention — (it is 
fitting that this piece of insolent barbarism should have been 
committed in almost the only important American city which 
is without a public library !) — with the exception of three or 
four volumes which I happen to have by me, I am obliged to 
rely for my statements on the memory of youthful readings, 
eight or ten years ago; but name me one book of the first 
order in which such passages as I refer to do not occur ! Tell 
me who can — what poet of the first grade escapes this brand, 
"immoral,'' or this spittle, "indecent"! If the great books 



A VODICATIOX. 23 

are not, in the point under consideration, in the same moral 
category as Leaves of Grass^ then why, either in translation or 
in the originals, either by a bold softening which dissolyes the 
author's meaning, or by absolute excision, are they nearly all 
expurgated ? Answer me that. By one process or the other, 
Brizeux, Cary, Wright, Cayley, Carlyle, eyerybody, expurgates 
Dante ; Langhorne and others expurgate Plutarch ; Potter and 
others expurgate ^schylus ; Gifford, Anthon, and others expur- 
gate Juyenal ; Creech, Watson, and others expurgate Lucre- 
tius ; Bowdler and others expurgate Shakespeare ; ISoii (I 
believe it is) expurgates Hafiz ; Wraxall and Wilbour expurgate 
Hugo ; Kirkland, Hart, and others expurgate Spenser ; 
somebody expurgates Yirgil ; somebody expurgates Byron ; 
the Oxford scholars dilute Tacitus ; Lord Derby expurgates 
Homer, besides making him as ridiculous as the plucked 
cock of Diogenes in translation ; seyeral hands expurgate 
Goethe ; and Archbishop Tillotson in design expurgates 
Moses, Ezekiel, Solomon, Isaiah, St. John, and all the others 
— a job which Dr. l!^oah Webster executes, but, thank God, 
cannot popularize. What book is spared ? IS'othing but a 
chain of circumstance, which seems divinely ordained, saves 
TiiS the unmutilated Bible. J^early every other great book 
bleeds. When one is not expui-gated, the balance is restored 
by its being cordially abused. Thanks to the splendid con- 
science and courao;e of Mr..Wio:ht, we can read Montaii^ne in 
Eno^lish without the omission of a single word ! Thanks also 
to Motteux and others, Ceryantes has gone untouched, and we 
have not as yet a family Babelais. I^either have we as yet a 
family Mankind nor a family Universe ; but this is an oversight 
which will, doubtless, be repaired in time. God will also, 
doubtless, be expurgated whenever it is possible. Why not ? 
One step to this end is taken in the expurgation of genius, which 
is His second manifestation, as Xature is His first ! Go on, gen- 
tlemen ! You will yet have things as ''moral" as you desire ! 
I am aware that so far as his opinion, not his act, is concerned, 
Mr. Harlan, however unintelligently, represents to some extent 
the shallow conclusions of his age ; and I know it will be said, 
that if the great books contain these passages, they ought to be 



24 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

expurgated. It is not mj design to endeavor to put a quart 
into people who only hold a gill, nor would I waste time in en- 
deavoring to convert a large class of persons whom I once heard 
"Walt Whitman describe, with liis usual Titanic richness and 
strength of phrase, as " the immutable granitic pudding-heads 
of the world." But there is a better class than these ; and I 
am filled with measureless amazement, that persons of high in- 
telligence, living to the age of maturity, do not perceive, at 
least, the immense and priceless scientific and human uses of 
such passages, and the consequent necessity, transcending and 
quashing all minor considerations, of having them where they 
are. But look at these sad sentences — a complete and felici- 
tous statement of the whole modern doctrine — in the pages of 
a man I love and revere : '' The literature of three centuries 
ago is not decent to be read ; we expurgate it. Within a hun- 
dred years, woman has become a reader, and for that reason, as 
much or more than any thing else, literature has sprung to a 
higher level, l^o need now to expurgate all you read." He 
goes on to argue that literature in the next century will be 
richer than in the classic epochs, because woman will contribute 
to it as an author — ^her contribution, I infer, to be of the kind 
that ^vill not need expurgating. These, I repeat, are sad sen- 
tences. If they are true, Bowdler is right to expurgate Shake- 
speare, and ISToah Webster the Bible. But no, they are not 
true ! I welcome woman into art ; but when she comes there 
grandly, she will not come either as expurgator or creator of 
emasculate or partial forms. Woman, grand in art, is Rosa 
Bonheur, painting with fearless pencil the surly, sublime Jo- 
vian bull, equipped for masculine use ; painting the powerful, 
ramping stallion in his amorous pride ; not weakly or meanly 
flinching from tlie full celebration of what God has made. 
Woman, grand in art, will come creating in forms, however 
novel, the absolute, the permanent, the real, the evil and the 
good, as ^schylus, as Cervantes, as Sliakespeare before her ; 
with sex, with truth, with universality, without omissions or 
concealments. And vv^oman, as the ideal reader of literature, 
is not the indelicate prude, flushing and squealing over some 
frank page ; it is tliat high and beautiful soifl, Marie de Gour- 



A VIiSri3lCATI0i!T. 25 

nay, devoutly absorbing tbe work of ber master, Montaigne ; 
finding it all great ; greatly comprebending, greatly accepting 
it all ; fronting its license and grossness witbout any of tbe livid 
sbnddering of Puritans ; and looking on tbe book in tbe same 
universal and kindly spirit as its autbor looked npon tbe world. 
Woman reading otberwise tban tbus — sbrinking from Apuleius, 
from Rabelais, from Aristopbanes, from Sbakes^Deare, from 
even "Wycberley, or Petronius, or Aretin, or Sbirley — is less 
tban man, is not ideal, not strong, not nobly good, but 
petty, and effeminate, and mean. And not for ber, nor by 
ber, nor by man, do I assent to tbe expurgation of tbe great 
books. Literature cannot spring to a bigber level tban tbeirs. 
Alas ! it bas sprung to a lower. Tbe level of tbe great books 
is tbe Infinite, tbe Absolute. To contain all, by containing tbe 
premise, tbe trutb, tbe idea and feeling of all ; to tally tbe uni- 
verse by profusion, variety, reality, mystery, enclosm-e, power, 
terror, beauty, service ; to be great to tbe utmost conceivabibty 
of greatness — wbat bigber level tban tbis can literature spring 
to? IJp, on tbe bigbest summit, stand sucb works, never 
to be surpassed, never to be supplanted. Tbeir indecency is 
not tbat of tbe vulgar; tbeir vulgarity is not tbat of tbe lovf. 
Tben- evil, if it be evil, is not tbere for notbing — it serves ; at 
tbe base of it is Love. — Every poet of tbe bigbest qualitj^ is, in 
tbe masterly coinage of tbe autbor of Leaves of Grass^ a kos- 
mos. His work, like bimself, is a second world, full of contra- 
rieties, strangely barmonized, and moial indeed, but only as 
tbe world is moral. Sbakespeare is all good, Pabelais is all 
good, Montaigne is all good ; not because all tbe tbougbts, 
tbe words, tbe manifestations are so, but because at tbe core, 
and permeating all, is an etbic intention — a love wbicb, tbrougb 
mysterious, indirect, subtle, seemingly absurd, often terrible and 
repulsive means, seeks to uplift, and never to degrade. It is 
tbe spirit in wbicb autborsbip is pursued, as Augustus Scblegel 
bas said, tbat makes it eitber an infamy or a vn*tue ; and tbe 
spirit of tbe great autbors, no matter Vv^bat tbeir letter, is one 
witb tbat wbicb pervades tbe creation. In migbty love, witb 
implements of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, INTature de- 
velops man ; genius also, in migbty love, witb implements of 



26 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

pain and j)leasiire, of good and evil, develops man ; no matter 
what the means, that is the end. Tell me not, then, of the 
indecent passages of the great poets ! The world, which is the 
poem of God, is full of indecent passages ! " Shall there be 
evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it ?" shonts Amos. 
" I form the light, and create darkness ; I make peace, and 
create evil ; I, the Lord, do all these things," thunders Isaiah. 
" This," says Coleridge, " is the deep abyss of the mystery of 
Grod." Yes, and it is the profound of the mystery of genius 
also ! Evil is part of the economy of genius, as it is part of 
the economy of God. — Gentle reviewers endeavor to find ex- 
cuses for the freedoms of geniuses. " It is to prove that they 
were above conventionalities." " It is referable to the age." 
" The age permitted a degree of coarseness," &c. " Shakes- 
peare's indecencies are the result of his age." O Ossa on Pe- 
lion, mount piled on mount, of error and folly! What has 
genius, spirit of ihe absolute and the eternal, to do with defi- 
nitions of position, or conventionalities, or the age ? Genius 
puts indecencies into its works, because God puts them into 
His world. Whatever the special reason in each case, this is 
the general reason in all cases. They are here, because they 
are there. That is the eternal why. — "No ; Alphonso of Cas- 
tile thought, that if he had been consulted at the Creation, he 
could have given a few hints to the Almighty. 'Not I. I 
play Alphonso neither to genius nor to God. 

Wliat is this poem, for the giving of which to America 



and the world, and for that alone, its author has been dismissed 
with ignominy from a Government office ? It is a poem which 
Schiller might have hailed as the noblest specimen of naive 
literature, worthy of a place beside Homer. It is, in the first 
place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, 
sprung from our own soil ; no savor of Europe nor of the past, 
nor of any other literature in it ; a vast carol of our own land, 
and of its Present and Future ; the strong and haughty psalm 
of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not 
whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words, and have 
considered well. Every other book by an American author im- 



A YESDICATIO:?^. 27 

plies, botli in form and substance, I cannot even say tlie Euro- 
pean, but tbe British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and 
Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we 
are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word — colo- 
nial — comprehends and stamps our literatm-e. In no literary 
form, except our newspapers, has there been any thing distinc- 
tively American. I note our best books — the works of Jeffer- 
son, the romances of Brockden Brown, the speeches of Webster, 
Everett's rhetoric, the divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's 
novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, 
the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the mis- 
cellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth, Ban- 
croft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, 
Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, 
benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of "Whittier, the 
dehcate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weii'd poetry of 
Edgar Poe, the wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving's EJrdck- 
erhocker, Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on Shakespeare, 
the political economy of Carey, the prison letters and immortal 
speech of John Brown, the lofty patrician eloquence of Wen- 
dell Phillips, and those diamonds of the first water, the 
great clear essays and greater poems of Emerson. This 
literatm-e has often commanding merits, and much of it is 
very precious to me ; but in respect to its national character, 
all that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less deeply, with 
America; and the foreign model, the foreign standards, the 
foreign culture, the foreign ideas, dominate over it all. At 
most, our best books were but straggling beams ; behold in 
Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise ! It is all 
our own ! The nation is in it ! In form a series of chants, in 
substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctively and 
utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without 
reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and 
popular life. Look at what it celebrates and contains ! — ^hard- 
ly to be enumerated without sometimes using the powerful, 
wondrous phrases of its author, so indissoluble are they with 
the things described. The essences, the events, the objects of 
America ; the myriad varied landscapes ; the teeming and 



28 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

giant cities ; tlie generous and turbulent populations ; the 
prairie solitudes ; the vast pastoral plateaus ; the Mississippi ; 
the land dense with villages and farms ; the habits, manners, 
customs ; the enormous diversity of temperatures ; the im- 
mense geography; the red aborigines passing away, "charg- 
ing the water and the land with names;" the early settle- 
ments ; the sudden uprising and defiance of the He volution ; 
the august figure of "Washington ; the formation and sacred- 
ness of the Constitution ; the pouring in of the emigrants ; the 
million-masted harbors ; the general opulence and comfort ; 
the fisheries, and whaling, and gold-digging, and manufactures, 
and agriculture ; the dazzling movement of new States, rush- 
ing to be great; JSTevada rising, Dakota rising, Colorado 
rising ; the tumultuous civilization around and beyond the 
Kocky Mountains thundering and spreading ; the Union im- 
pregnable ; feudalism in all its forms forever tracked and 
assaulted ; liberty deathless on these shores ; the noble and 
free character of the people ; the equality of male and female ; 
the ardor, the fierceness, the friendship, the dignity, the enter- 
prise, the affection, the courage, tlie love of music, the passion 
for personal freedom ; the mercy and justice and compassion 
of the people ; the popular faults and vices and crimes ; the 
deference of the President to the private citizen ; the image 
of Christ forever deepening in the public mind as the brother 
of despised and rejected persons ; the promise and wild song 
of the future ; the vision of the Federal mother, seated with 
more than antique majesty in the midst of her many children ; 
the jjouring glories of the hereafter; the vistas of splendor, in- 
cessant and branching; the tremendous elements, breeds, 
adjustments of America — with all these, with more, with 
every thing transcendent, amazing, and new, undimmed by the 
pale cast of thought, and with the very color and brawn of 
actual life, the whole gigantic epic of om- continental being 
unwinds in all its magnificent reality in these pages. To 
understand Greece, study the IHoaI and Odyssey; study 
Leaves of Grass to understand America. Her Democracy is 
there. Would you have a text-book of Democracy ? The 
writings of Jefferson are good ; De Tocqueville is better ; but 



A VINBIOATIOIT. 29 

the great poet always contains historian and philosopher — and 
to know the comprehending spirit of this country, you shall 
question these insulted pages. Yet this vast and patriotic 
celebration and presentation of all that is our own, is but a 
part of this tremendous volume. Here in addition is thrown 
in poetic form, a philosophy of life, rich, subtle^ composite, 
ample, adequate to these great shores. Here are presented 
superb types of models of manly and womanly character for 
the future of this country, athletic, large, naive, free, dauntless, 
haughty, loving, nobly carnal, nobly spiritual, equal in body 
and soul, acceptive and tolerant as l^ature, generous, cosmo- 
politan, above all, religious. Here are erected standards, drawn 
from the circumstances of our case, by which not merely our 
literature, but all our performance, our politics, art, behavior, 
love, conversation, dress, society, every thing belonging to our 
lives and their conduct, will be shaped and recreated. A power- 
ful afflatus from the Infinite has given this book life. A voice 
which is the manliest of human voices sounds through it all. 
In it is the strong spirit which will surely mould our future. 
Mark my words : its sentences will yet clinch the arguments 
of statesmen ; its precepts will be the laws of the people ! 
From the beams of this seminal sun will be generated, with 
tropical luxuriance, the myriad new forms of thought and 
life in America. And in view of the national character and 
national purpose of this work — in view of its vigorous re-en- 
forcement and service to all that we hold most precious — I 
make the claim here, that so far from defaming and persecu- 
ting its author, the attitude of an American statesman or public 
officer toward him should be to the highest degree friendly 
and sustaining. 

Beyond his country, too, this poet serves the world. He 
refutes by his example the saying of Goethe, one of those 
which stain that noble fame with baseness, that a great poet 
cannot be patriotic ; and he dilates to a universal use which 
redoubles the splendors of his volume, and makes it dear to all 
that is human. I am not its authorized interpreter, and can 
only state, at the risk of imperfect expression, and perhaps 
error, what its meanings and purpose seem to me. But I see 



30 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

that, in Ms general intention, the author has aimed to express 
that most common but wondrous thing — that strange assem- 
blage of soul, body, intellect — beautiful, mystical, terrible, 
limited, boundless, ill-assorted, contradictory, yet singularly har- 
monized — a Human Being, a single separate Identity, a Man, 
— ^himself ; but himself typically, and in his universal being. 
This he has done with perfect candor, including the bodily 
attributes and organs, as necessary component parts of the 
creation. Every thinking person should see the value and use 
of such a presentation of human nature as this. I also see — 
and it is from these parts of the book that much of the mis- 
understanding and offence arises — that this poet seeks in subtle 
ways to rescue from the keeping of blackguards and de- 
bauchees, to which it has been abandoned, and to redeem to 
noble thought and use, the great element of amativeness or 
sexuality, with all its acts and organs. Sometimes by direct 
assertion, sometimes by implication, he rejects the prevaihng 
admission that this element is vile; declares its natural or 
normal manifestation to be sacred and unworthy shame ; awards 
it an equal but not superior sanctity with the other elements 
that compose man ; and illustrates his doctrine and sets his 
example, by applying this element, with all that appertains to 
it, to use as part of the imagery of poetry. Then, besides, 
diffused like an atmosphere tlu-oughout the poem, tincturing 
all its quality, and giving it that sacerdotal and prophetic 
character which makes it a sort of American Bible, is the pro- 
nounced and ever-recurring assertion of the divinity of all 
things. In a spirit like that of the Egyptian priesthood, who 
wore the dung-beetle in gold on their crests, perhaps as a sym- 
bol of the sacredness of even the lowest forms of life, the poet 
celebrates all the creation as noble and holy — the meanest and 
lowest parts of it, as well as the most lofty ; all equally pro- 
jections of the Infinite ; all emanations of the creative life of 
God. Peiq^etual hymns break from him in praise of the divine- 
ness of the universe : he sees a halo around every shape, how- 
ever low ; and life in all its forms inspires a rapture of wor- 
ship. 

How some persons can think a book of this sort bad, is 



A YI>n)ICATIOi?T. 31 

clearer to me than it used to be. Swedenborg sajs that to tbe 
devils, perfumes are stinks. I happen to know that some of the 
vilest abuse that it has received, has come from men of the 
lowest possible moral life. It is not so easy to understand how 
some persons of culture aiid judgment can fail to perceive its 
literary greatness. Making fair allowance for faults, which no 
s^reat work, from Hamlet to the world itself, is perhaps without, 
the book, in form as in substance, seems to me a masterpiece. 
Never in literature has there been more absolute conceptive or 
presentative power. The forms and shows of things are bodied 
forth so that one may say they become visible, and are alive. 
Here, in its grandest, freest use, is the English language, from 
its lowest compass to the top of the key ; from the powerful, 
rank idiom of the streets and fi(^lds, to the last subtlety of aca- 
demic speech — ample, various, telling, luxuriant, pictorial, linal, 
conquering ; absorbing from other languages to its own pur- 
poses their choicest terms ; its rich and daring composite defy- 
ing grammar ; its most incontestable and splendid triumphs 
achieved, as Jefferson notes of the superb Latin of Tacitus, in 
haughty scorn of the rules of grammarians. Another sin- 
gular excellence is the metre — entirely novel, free, flexible, 
melodious, corresponsive to the thought ; its noble proportions 
and cadences reminding of winds and waves, and the vast ele- 
mental sounds and motions of JSTature, and having an equal 
variety and liberty. I have heard this brought into dispar- 
aging comparison with the metres of Temiyson; the poetry 
also disparaged in the same connection. I hardly know what 
to think of people who can talk in this way. To say nothing 
of the preference, the mere parallel is only less ludicrous and 
arbitrary than would be one between Moore and Isaiah. Ten- 
nyson is an exquisite and sumptuous poet of the third, perhaps 
the fourth order ; as certainly below Milton and Yirgil as 
Milton and Yirgil are certainly below ^schylus and Homer. 
His full-fluted verbal music, which is one of his chief merits, 
is of an extraordinary beauty. But in this respect the compar- 
ison between him and Walt Whitman is that bet^\^een melody 
and harmony — between a song by Franz Abt or Schubert and 
a symphony hj Beethoven. Speaking generally, and not with 



32 THE GOOD GRAY POET. 

exact justice to either, the words of Tennyson, irrespective of 
their sense, make music to the ear ; while the sense of Walt 
Whit^nan's words makes a loftier mnsic in the mind. For a 
music, perfect and vast, subtle and more than auricular — woven 
not alone from the verbal sounds and rhythmic cadences, but 
educed by the thought and feeling of the verse from the reader's 
soul, by the power of a spell few hold — I know of nothing .supe- 
rior to " By the bivouac's fitful flame," the " Hymn of Dead 
Soldiers," the " Spirit whose work is done," the " Arming of 
Mannahatta," or that most mournful and noble of all love 
songs, '' Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd," in Dricm-Tajjs ; 
or the " Word out of the Sea," the " Elemental Drifts," the 
entire section entitled " Walt Whitman," the hymn commen- 
cing " Splendor of falling day," or the great salute to the 
French Hevolution of '93, entitled " France," in Leaves of Grass. 
If these are not examples of great structural harmony as well 
as of the highest poetry, there are none in literature. And if 
all these were wanting, there is a single poem in the late 
volume, Drum- Taj)S^ which, if the author had never written 
another line, would be sufficient to place him among the chief 
poets of the world. I do not refer to " Chanting the Square 
Deific" — though that also would be sufficient, in its incomparable 
breadth and grandeur of conception and execution, to establish 
the highest poetic reputation — but to the strain commemora- 
ting the death of the beloved President, commencing, '' When 
lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed" — a poem whose rich and 
sacred beauty and rapture of tender religious passion, spreading 
aloft into the sublime, leave it unique and solitary in literature, 
and will make it the chosen and immortal hymn of Death for- 
ever. Emperors might well elect to die, could their memories 
be surrounded with such a requiem, which, next to the grief 
and love of the people, is the grandest and the only grand 
funeral music poured around Lincoln's bier. In the face of 
works like these, testimony of the presence on earth of a mighty 
soul, I am thunderstruck at the low tone of the current criti- 
cism. Even from eminent persons, who ought to know liow to 
measure literature, and vdio are friendly to this author, I hear, 
mingled with inadequate praise, the self-same censures — the 



A VINDICATION. 33 

very epithets, even, which Yoltaire, not more ridiculously, 
passed upon Shakespeare. Take care, gentlemen ! What you, 
like Yoltaire, take for rudeness, chaos, barbarism, lack of form, 
may be the sacred and magnificent wildness of a virgin world 
of poetry, all unlike these fine and ordered Tennysonian rose- 
gardens which are your ideal, but excelling these as the globe 
excels the parterre. I, at any rate, am not deceived. I see 
how swiftly the smart, bright, conventional standards of mod- 
ern criticism would assign Isaiah or Ezekiel to the limbo of 
abortions. I see of how limited worth are the wit and scholar- 
ship of these Saturday Reviews and London Examiners^ with 
their dopjpelgangers on this side of the Atlantic, by the treat- 
ment some poetic masterpiece of China or Hindustan receives 
when it falls into their hands for judgment. Any thing not cast 
in modern conventional forms, any novel or amazing beauty, 
strikes them as comic. Eead Mr. Buckley's notes, even at this 
late day, on a poet so incredibly great as ^schylus. Bead an 
^schylus illustrated by reference to ISTicholas Nickleby, Mrs. 
Bombazine, and Mantalini, and censured in contemptuous, jocu- 
lar, or flippant annotations — this, too, by an Oxford scholar of 
rank and merit ! No wonder Leaves of Grass goes underrated 
or unperceived. Modern criticism is Yoltaire estimating the 
Apocalypse as "dirt" and roaring v/ith laughter over the 
leaves of Ezekiel. Why ? Because this poetry has not the comi; 
tread, the perfume, the royal purple of Racine — only its own 
wild and formless incomparable sublimity. Yoltaire was an im- 
mense and noble person ; only it was not part of his greatness to 
be able to see that other greatness which transcends common- 
sense as the Infinite transcends the Finite. These children of 
Yoltaire, also, who make the choirs of modern criticism, have 
great merits. But to justly estimate poetry of the first order, 
is not one of them. " Shakespeare's Tempest, or the Midsxim- 
mer NigMs Dream., or any such damned nonsense as that," said 
one of this school to me a month ago. " Look at that perpen- 
dicular grocery sign-board : the letters all fantastic and reading 
from top to bottom : a mere oddity ; that is Leaves of Grass^^ 
said another, a person of eminence. JSTo, gentlemen ! you and 
I differ. I see, very clearly, the nature of a work like this, 

3 



34 THE GOOD GRAY POET. 

the warmest praise of which, not to mention your blame, has 
been meagre and insufficient to the last degree, and which cen- 
turies must ponder before they can sufficiently honor. You 
have had your say ; let me have at least the beginning of mine: 
l^Tothing that America had before in literature, rose above 
construction : this is a creation. Idle, and worse than idle, is 
any attempt to place this author either among or below the 
poets of the day. They are but singers ; he is a bard. In him 
you have one of that mighty brotherhood who, more than 
statesmen, mould the future : who, as Fletcher of Saltoun said, 
when they make the songs of a nation, it matters not who 
make the laws. I class him boldly, and the future will confirm 
my judgment, among the great creative minds of the. world. 
By a quality almost incommunicable, which makes its possessor, 
no matter what his diversity or imperfections, equal with the 
Supremes of art, and by the very structure of his mind, he 
belongs there. His place is beside Shakespeare, JEschylus, 
Cervantes, Dante, Homer, Isaiah — the bards of the last ascent, 
the brothers of the radiant summit. And if any man think 
this estimate extravagant, I leave him, as Lord Bacon says, to 
the gravity of that judgment and pass on. Enough for me to pro- 
nounce this book grandly good and supremely ^reat. Clamor, 
on the score of its morality, is nothing but a form of turpitude ; 
denial of its greatness is nothing but an insanity ; and the roar of 
Sodom and the laughter of Bedlam shall not, by a hair's breadth, 
swerve my verdict. 

As for those passages which have been so strangely inter- 
preted, I have to say that nothing but the horrible inanity of 
prudery, to which civilization has become subject, and which 
affects even many good persons, could cloud and distort their 
palpable innocence and nobleness. What chance has an author 
to a reasonable interpretation of such utterances in an age 
when squeamishness, the Siamese twin-brother of indelicacy, is 
throned as the censor of all life ? Look at the nearest, the 
commonest and homeliest evidences of the abysm into which 
we have fallen ! Here in my knowledge is an estimable family 
which, when the baby playing on the floor kicked up its skirts, 
I have repeatedly seen rush en masse to pull down the im- 



A viia)icATJO]^. 35 

modest petticoat. Here is a lady whose sliame of lier body is 
such, that she will not disrobe in the presence of one of her own 
sex, and thinks it horrible to sleep at night without being 
swaddled in half her garments. Everywhere you see women 
perpetually glancing to be sure their skirts are quite down ; 
twistins: their heads over their shoulders, like some of the 
damned in Dante, to get a rear view ; drawing in their feet if 
so much as the toe happens to protrude beyond the hem of the 
gown, and in various ways betraying a morbid consciousness 
which is more offensive than positive immodesty. When I 
went to the hospital, I saw one of those pretty and good girls, 
who in muslin and ribbons ornament the wards, and are called 
nurses, pick up her skirts and skurry away, flushing hectic, 
with averted face, because as she passed a cot the poor fellow 
who lay there happened, in his uneasy turnings, to thrust part 
of a manly leg from beneath the coverlid. I once heard Emer- 
son severely censured in a private company, five or six persons 
present, and I the only dissenting voice, because in one of his 
essays he had used the word " spermatic." When Tennyson 
published the Idyls of the King^ some of the journals in 
both America and England, and several persons in my own 
hearing, censured the weird and magnificent Vivien^ one of his 
finest poems, as " immoral " and " vulgar." When Charles 
Sumner, in the debate on Louisiana, characterized the new- 
formed State as " a seven months' child begotten by the baj^onet, 
in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste " — a stroke of 
absolute genius — he was censured by the public prints, and re- 
minded that there were ladies in the gallery ! Lately the Lon- 
don Observer^ one of the most eminent of the British journals, 
in a long and labored editorial on the bathing at Margate, 
denounced the British wives and matrons in the severest terms 
for sitting on the beach when men were bathing in " slight 
bathing-dresses" (it was not even pretended that the men 
were nude) — and even went the length of demanding of the civil 
authorities that they should invoke the interference of Parlia- 
ment to stop this scandal ! These are fair minor specimens of 
the prudery, worse than vice, but also the concomitant of the 
most shocking vice, which prevails everywhere. Its travesty is 



36 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

the dressing in pantalettes the '^ limbs " of the piano ; its 
insolent tragi-comedy is the expulsion of Shakespeare from 
office because he writes " indecent passages ;" its tragedy is the 
myriad results of wrong and crime and ruin^ carried into all the 
details of every relation of life. 

A civilization in which such things as I have mentioned can 
be thought or done, is guilty to the core. It is not purity, it is 
impurity, and of the shallowest kind^ which calls clothes more 
decent than the naked body — thus inanely conferring upon 
the work of the tailor or milliner a modesty denied to the 
work of God. It is not innocent but guilty thought which 
attaches shame, secrecy,, baseness, and horror to great and 
august parts and functions of humanity. The tacit admission 
everywhere prevalent th-^it portions of the human physiology 
are base ; that the amative feelings and acts of the sexes, even 
when hallowed by marriage, are connected with a low sen- 
suality ; and that these, with such subjects or occurrences as 
the conception and birth of children, are to be absconded 
from, blushed at, concealed, ignored, withheld from education, 
and in every way treated as if they belonged to the category 
of sins again&t Nature, is not only in itself a contemptible 
insanity, but a main source of unspeakable personal and social 
evil. From the morbid state of mind which such a theory and 
practice must induce, are spawned a thousand guilty actions of 
every description and degree. There is no occurrence in the 
whole vast and diversifi.ed range of sexual evil, from the first 
lewd thought in the mind of the budding child, the very suspi- 
cion of which makes the parent tremble, down to the last 
ghastly and bloody spasm of lust which rends its hapless 
victim in some rusurban woodland, that is not fed mainly from 
this mystery and mother of abominations to whose care civili- 
zation has remitted the entire subject. The poet who, in the 
spirit of that divine utility which marked the first great 
bards and will mark the last, seeks to make literature reme- 
diate to an estate like this, works in the best interests of his 
country and his fellow-beings, and deserves their gratitude. 
This is what Walt Whitman has done. Directly and indirectly, 
in forms as various as the minds he seeks to influence ; in frank 



A vixdicatio:n". 37 

opposition to tlie great sexual falsehood by wliicli we are ruled 
and ruined, he has thrown into civilization a conception 
intended to be slowly and insensibly absorbed, and to ultimately 
appear in results of good — the conception of the individual as 
a divine democracy of essences, powers, attributes, functions, 
organs — all equal, all sacred, all consecrate to noble use ; the 
sexual part, the same as the rest ; no more a subject for myster}^ 
or shame or secrecy than the intellectual or the mannal or the 
alimentary or the locomotive part — divinely common-place 
as head, or hand, or stomach, or foot ; and, though sacred, to be 
regarded as so ordinary that it shall be employed, the same as 
any other part, for the purposes of literature — an idea which he 
exemplifies in his poetry by a metaphorical use which it is a 
deep disgrace to any intellect to misunderstand. This is his 
lesson. This is one of the central ideas which rule the myriad 
teeming play of his volume, and interpret it as a law of Mature 
interprets the complex play of facts which proceeds from it. 
This, then, is not license, but thought. It may be eiToneous, it 
may be chimerical, it may be inefiectual ; but it is thought, 
serious and solemn thought, on a most difficult and deeply 
immersed question — thought emanating from the deep source of 
a great love and care for men, and seeking nothing but a pure 
human welfare. When, therefore, any persons undertake to 
outrage and injure its author for having given it to the world, 
it is not merely as the pigmy incarnations of the depraved 
modesty, the surface morality, the filthy and libidinous decency 
of the age, but it is as the persecutors of thought that they 
stand before us. It is no excuse for them to say, that such treat- 
ment of Walt Whitman is justifiable, because his book appears 
to them bad. Waiving every other consideration, I have to in- 
form them that on this subject they should not permit themselves 
the immodesty of a judgment. It is not for such as they to 
attempt to prison in the poor cell of their opinion the vast jour- 
ney and illumination of the human mind. ISTo matter what the 
book seems to them, they should remember that an author de- 
serves to be tried by his peers, and that a book may easily seem 
to some persons quite another thing from what it really is to 
others. Hei^ is Habelais, a writer who wears all the crowns ; 



88 THE GOOD GEAr POET. 

but even Mr. Harlan would consider Walt Whitman white as 
purity beside him. "Filth," "zanyism," "grossness," "profli- 
gacy," "licentiousness," "sensuality," "beastliness" — these are 
samples of the epithets T7hich have fallen, like a rain of excre- 
ment, on Rabelais for three hundred years. And yet it is of 
him that the holy-hearted Coleridge — an authority of the first 
order on all purely literary or ethical qnestions — it is of him that 
Coleridge says, and says justly : " I could write a treatise in 
praise of tJie moral elevation of Rabelais' work which would 
make the Church stare, and the Conventicle groan, and yet 
would be the truth, and nothing but the truth." The moral 
elevation of Rabelais 1 A great criticism, a needed word. It 
is just. ISTo matter for seeming — Rabelais is good to the very 
core. Rabelais' book, viewed with reference to ensemble, 
viewed in relation, viewed in its own proper quality by otlier 
than cockney standards, is righteous to the uttermost extreme. 
So is the work of Walt Whitman, far other in character, and 
far less obnoxious to criticism than that of Rabelais, but which 
demands at least as liberal a judgment, and which it is not for 
any deputy, however high in office, to assign to shame. I know 
not what further vicissitude of insult and outrage is in store for 
this great man. It may be that the devotees of a castrated 
literature, the earthworms that call themselves authors, the 
confectioners that pass for poets, the flies that are recognized 
as critics, the bigots, the dilettanti, the prudes and the fools, 
are more potent than I dream to mar the fortunes of his earth- 
ly hours; but above and beyond them uprises a more majestic 
civilization in the immense and sane serenities of futurity ; and 
the man who has achieved that sublime thing, a genuine book; 
who has written to make his land greater, her citizens better, 
his race nobler ; who has striven to serve men by communi- 
cating to them that which they least know — their own experi- 
ence ; who has thrown into living verse a philosophy designed 
to exalt life to a higher level of sincerity, reality, religion ; who 
has torn away disguises and illusions, and restored to common- 
est things, and the simplest and roughest people, their divine 
significance and natural, antique dignity ; and who has wrapped 
his country and all created things as with splendors of sunrise. 



A VINDICATIOIS'. 89 

in the beams of a powerful and gorgeous poetry — that man, 
whatever be the clouds that close around his fame, is assured 
illustrious ; and when every face lowers, when every hand is 
raised against him, turning his back upon his day and genera- 
tion, he may write upon his book, with all the pride and grief 
of the calumniated ^schylus, the haughty dedication that poet 
graved upon his hundred dramas : To Time ! 

And Time will remember him. He holds upon the future 
this supreme claim of all high poets — behind the book, a life loyal 
to humanity ! Never, if I can help it, shall be forgotten those 
immense and divine labors in the hospitals of Washington, 
among the wounded of the Avar, to which he voluntarily de- 
voted himself, as the best service he could render to his strug- 
gling country, and which illustrate that boundless love which 
is at once the dominant element of his character, and the cen- 
tral source of his genius. How can I tell the nature and ex- 
tent of that sublime ministration ! During those years, Wash- 
ington was a city in whose unbuilt places and around whose 
borders were thickly planted dense white clusters of barracks. 
These were the hospitals — neat, orderly, rectangular, strange 
towns, whose every citizen lay drained with sickness or wrung 
with pain. There, in those long wards, in rows of cots on 
either side, were stretched, in all attitudes and aspects of 
mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted anguish, of death, the 
martyrs of the war; and among them, with a soul that 
tenderly remembered the little children in many a dwelling 
mournful for those fathers, the worn and anxious wives, hag- 
gard with thinking of those husbands, the girls weeping their 
spirits fit'om their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who from 
afar yearned to the bedsides of those sons, walked Walt 
Whitman in the spirit of Christ, soothing, healing, consoling, 
restoring, night and day, for years ; never failing, never tiring, 
constant, vigilant, faithful ; performing, without fee or reward, 
his self-imposed duty ; giving to the task all his time and means, 
and doing every thing that it is possible for one unaided human 
being to do. Others fail, others flag; good souls that came 
often and did their best, yield and drop away; he remains. 
Winter and summer, night and day, every day in the week, 



40 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

every day in the year, all tlie time, till the winter of '65, when 
for a few hours daily, during six months, his duties to the 
Government detain him ; after that, all the time he can spare, 
he visits the hospitals. What does he do ? See ! At the red 
aceldama of Fredericksburg, in '62, be is in a hospital on the 
banks of the Rappahannock ; it is a large brick house, full of 
wounded and dying ; in the yard, at the foot of a tree, is a 
cart-load of amputated legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers ; dead 
bodies shrouded in brown woollen blankets are near ; there are 
fresh graves in the yard : he is at work in the house among the 
officers and men, lying, unclean and bloody, in their old clothes ; 
he is up stairs and down ; he is poor, he has nothing to give 
this time, but he writes letters for the wounded ; he cheers up 
the desponding; he gives love. Some of the men, war-sad, 
passionately cling to him ; they weep ; he will sit for hours 
with them if it will give them ©omfort. Here he is in Wash- 
ington, after Chancellor sville, at night, on the wharf : two boat- 
loads of wounded (and oh, such wounded !) have been landed ; 
they lie scattered about on the landing, in the rain, drenched, 
livid, lying on the ground, on old quilts, on blankets ; their 
heads, their limbs bound in bloody rags ; a few torches light the 
scene ; the ambulances, the callous drivers are here ; groans, 
sometimes a scream, resound tlirough the flickering light and 
the darkness. He is there, moving around ; he soothes, he 
comforts, he consoles ; he assists to lift the wounded into the 
ambulances ; he helps to place the worst cases on the stretchers ; 
his kiss is warm upon the pallid lips of those who yearn to him, 
often mere children ; his tears drop upon the faces of the 
dying. Here he is in the hospitals of Washington — the Camp- 
bell, the Patent Office, the Eighth street, the Judiciary, the 
Carver, the Douglas, the Armory Square. He writes letters ; 
he writes to fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, sweethearts ; some 
of the soldiers are poor penmen ; some cannot get paper and 
envelopes ; some fear to write lest they should worry the folks 
at home : he writes for them all ; he uses that genius which 
shall endure to the latest generation, to say the felicitous, the 
consoling, the cheering, the prudent, the best word. He goes 
through the wards ; he talks cheerfully, he distributes amusing 



A VI]ST)ICATION. 41 

reading-matter; at niglit or by day, when the horrible 
monotony of the hospital weighs like lead on every soul, he 
reads to the men ; he is careful to sit away from the cot of any 
poor fellow so sick or wounded as to be easily disturbed, but he 
gathers into a large group as many as he can, and amuses them 
with some story or enlivening game, like that of Twenty Ques- 
tions, or starts some discussion, or with some device dispels the 
gloom. For his daily occupation, he goes from ward to ward, 
doing all he can to hearten and revive the spirits of the 
sufferers, and keep the balance in favor of their recovery. 
Usually, his plan is to pass, with haversack strapped across his 
shoulder, from cot to cot, distributing small gifts ; his theory 
is that these men, far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need 
more than any thing some practical token that they are not 
forsaken, that some one feels a fatherly or brotherly interest in 
them ; hence, he gives them what he can ; to particular cases, 
entirely penniless, he distributes small sums of money, fifteen 
cents, twenty cents, thirty cents, fifty cents, not much to each, 
for there are many, but under the circumstances these little 
sums are and mean a great deal. He also distributes and 
directs envelopes, gives letter-paper, postage-stamps, tobacco, 
apples, figs, sweet biscuit, preserves, blackberries; gets deli- 
cate food for special cases; sometimes a dish of oysters or 
a dainty piece of meat, or some savory morsel for some 
poor creature who loathes the hospital fare, but whose appe- 
tite may be tempted. In the hot weather he buys boxes of 
oranges and distributes them, grateful to lips baked with 
fever; he buys boxes of lemons, he buys sugar, to make 
lemonade for those parched throats of sick soldiers ; he buys 
canned peaches, stra^wberries, pears ; he buys in the market 
fresh fruit ; he buys ice-cream and treats the whole hospital ; he 
buys whatever delicacies and luxuries his limited resources will 
allow, and he makes them go as far as he can. Where does he 
get the means for this expenditure ? For Walt Whitman is 
poor ; — he is poor, and has a right to be proud of his poverty, 
for it is the sacred, the ancient, the immemorial poverty of 
goodness and genius. He gets the means by writing for news- 
papers; he expends all he gets upon his boys, his darlings, the 



42 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

sick and maimed soldiers — the young heroes of the land who 
saved their country, the laborers of America who fought for 
the hopes of the world. He adds to his own earnings the con- 
tributions of noble souls, often strangers, who, in Boston, in ISTew 
York, in Providence, in Brooklyn, in Salem, in Washington 
and elsewhere, have heard that such a man walks the wards, 
and who volunteer to send him this assistance; when at last, 
he gets a place under Government, and till Mr. Harlan turns 
him out, he has a salary which he spends in the same way ; 
sometimes his wrung heart gets the better of his prudence, and he 
spends till he himself is in difficulties. He gives all his money, 
he gives all his tune, he gives all his love.. To every inmate 
of the hospital something, if only a vital word, a cheering 
touch, a caress, a trifling gift ; but always in his rounds he se- 
lects the special cases, the sorely wounded, the deeply despond- 
ent, the homesick, the dying : to these he devotes himself; he 
buoys them up with fond words, with caresses, with personal 
affection ; he bends over them, strong, clean, cheerful, per- 
fumed, loving, and his magnetic touch and love sustain them. 
He does not shrink from the smell of then- sickening gangrene ; 
he does not flinch from their bloody and rotten mutilations ; he 
draws nigher for all that; he sticks closer; he dresses those 
wounds ; he fans those burning temples ; he moistens those 
parched lips ; he washes those wasted bodies ; he watches 
often and often in the dim ward by the sufferer's cot all night 
long ; he reads, from the 'New Testament, the words sweeter 
than music to the sinking soul ; he soothes with prayer the 
bedside of the dying ; he sits, mournful and loving, by the 
wasted dead. How can I tell the story of his labors ! How 
can I describe the scenes among which he moved with such en- 
durance and devotion, watched by me, for years ! Few kno-sv 
the spectacle presented by those grim wards. It was hideous. 
I have been there at night when it seemed that I should die 
with sympathy if I stayed ; — v\^hen the horrible attitudes of 
anguish, the horizontal shapes of cadaver on the white cots, 
the quiet sleepers, the excruciated emaciations of men, the 
bloody bandages, the smell of plastered sores, the dim lamp- 
light, the long white ward, the shallow girl-nurse flirting with 



A VIIS'DICATIO:^". 43 

the wardmaster or surgeon, tlie tinkle of the ward piano mixed 
with the groans of some grisly wretch, half hidden behind a 
screen, naked, shorn of both arms, held by the assistant upon 
a stool, made up a scene whose well-compounded horror is un- 
speakable. !Now realize a man without worldly inducement, 
without reward, without the mandate of official duty, volun- 
tarily, from love and compassion only, giving up his life to scenes 
like these ; foregoing pleasure and rest for vigils, as in chambers 
of torture, among the despairing, the mangled, the dying, 
the forms upon which shell and rifle and sabre had wrought 
every bizarre atrocity of mutilation ; immuring himself in the 
air of their sighs, their moans, the mutter and scream of their 
delirium ; breathing the stench of their putrid wounds ; taking 
up his part and lot with them, living a life of privation and de- 
nial, and hoarding his scanty means for the relief and mitigation 
of their anguish. That man is Walt Whitman ! I said his 
labors have been immense. The word is well chosen. I speak 
within bounds when I say that, during those years, he has been 
in contact with, and, in one form or another, either in hospital or 
on the field, personally ministered to, upward of one hundi'ed 
thousand sick and wounded men. You mothers of America, 
these were your sons ! Faithfully and with a mother's love, he 
tended them for you ! Many and many a life has he saved — 
many a time has he felt his heart grow great with that delicious 
triumph — many a home owes its best l)eloved to him. Sick and 
wounded, officers and privates, the black soldiers the same as 
the white, the teamsters, the poor creatures in the contraband 
camps, the rebel the same as the loyal — he did his best for them 
all ; they were all sufferers, they were all men. — Let him pass. 
I note Thoreau's saying, that he suggests sometliing more tlian 
human. It is true. I see it in his book and in his life. To 
that something more than liuman which is also in all men — to 
the hour of judgment, to the hour of sanity — let me resign him. 
iSTot for such as I to vindicate such as he. INTot for him, per- 
haps, the recognition of his day and generation. But a life 
and deeds like his, lightly esteemed by men, sink deep into the 
memory of Man. Great is the stormy light of Zutphen ; it is 
the young lion of English Protestantism springing in haughty 



44 THE GOOD GEAY POET. 

fury for the defence of the I^\ etherlancls from the bloody ravin 
of Spain ; but Philip Sidney passing the iiask of water from his 
own lips to the dying soldier looms gigantic, and makes all the 
foreground of its noble purpose and martial rage ; and wha-'-ever 
be the verdict of the present, sure am I that hereafter and to 
the latest ages, when Bull Run and Shiloh and Port Hudson, 
when Yicksburg and Stone River and Fort Donelson, when 
Pea Ridge and Chancellorsville and Gettysbm-g and the Wil- 
derness, and the great march from Atlanta to Savannah, and 
Richmond rolled in flame, and all the battles for the life of the 
Republic against her last internal foe, are gathered up in accu- 
mulated terraces of struggle upon the mountain of history, well 
relieved against those bright and bloody tumultuous giant tab- 
leaux, and all the dust and thunder of a noble war, the men and 
women of America will love to gaze upon the stalwart form of 
the good gray p-oet, bending to heal the hurts of their wound- 
ed and soothe the souls of their dying, and the deep and simple 
words of the last great martyr will be theirs — " TV ell, he looks 
like A Ma:^!" 

So let me leave him. And if there be any who think this 
tribute in bad taste, even to a poet so great, a person so un- 
usual, a man so heroic and loving, I answer, that when on 
grounds of taste foes withhold detraction, friends may with 
hold eulogy ; and that at any rate I recognize no reason for 
keeping back just words of love and reverence when, as in this 
case, they must glow upon the sullen foil of the printed hatreds 
of ten years. To that long record of hostility, I am only glad 
and proud to be able to oppose this record of affection. — And, 
with respect to the crowning enmity of the Secretary of the 
Interior, let no person misjudge the motives upon which I 
denounce it. Personally, apart from this act, I have nothing 
against Mr. Harlan. He is of my own party ; and my politics 
have been from my youth essentially the same as liis own. I 
do not know him ; I have never even seen him ; I criticise no 
attitude nor action of his life but this ; and I criticise this with 
as little personality as I can give to an action so personal. I 
withhold, too, as far as I can, every expression of resentment ; 
and no one who knew all I know of this matter could fail to 



A VES-DICATION. 45 

credit me with singular and great moderation. For, behind 
what I have related, there is another history, every incident of 
which I have recovered from the obscurity to which it was 
confided ; and, as I think of it, it is with difficulty that I 
restrain my just indignation. Instead of my comparatively 
cold and sober treatment, this transaction deserves rather the 
pitiless exposure and the measureless, stern anger and red-hot 
steel scourge of Juvenal. jBut I leave untold its darkest de- 
tails ; and, waiving every other consideration, I rest solely and 
squarely on the general indignity and injury this action offers 
to intellectual liberty. I claim that to expel an author from a 
public office and subject him to public contumely, solely 
because he has published a book which no one can declare 
immoral without declaring all the grand books immoral, is to 
affix a penalty to thought, and to obstruct the freedom of 
letters. I declare this act the audacious captain of a series of 
acts and a style of opinions whose tendency and effect through- 
out Christendom is to dwarf and degrade literature, and to 
make great books impossible, except under pains of martyr- 
dom. As such, I arraign it before every liberal and thought- 
ful mind. I denounce it as a sinister precedent ; as a ban upon 
the free action of genius ; as a logical insult to all command- 
ing literature ; and as in every way a most serious and heinous 
wrong.' Differsnce of opinion there may and must .be upon 
the topics which in this letter I have grouped around it, but 
upon the act itself there can be none. As I drag it up here 
into the sight of the world, I call upon every scholar, every 
man of letters, every editor, every good fellow everywhere who 
wields the pen, to make common cause with me in rousing 
upon it the full tempest of reprobation it deserves. I remem- 
ber Tennyson, a spirit of vengeance over the desecrated grave 
of Moore ; I think of Scott rolling back the tide of obloquy 
from Bvron : I see Addison p-ildino; the blackeninG: fame of 
Swift ; I mark Southampton befriending Shakespeare ; I recall 
Du Ballay enshielding Rabelais ; I behold Ilutten fortressing 
Luther ; here is Boccaccio lifting the darkness from Dante, 
and scattering flame on his foes in Florence ; this is Bembo 
protecting Pompon atius; that is Grostete enfolding Roger 



46 THE GOOD GEAY POET. A VINDICATION. 

Bacon from tlie monkisli fury; tliere, covered with light, 
is Aristophanes defending ^schylns : and if there lives aught 
of that old chivalry of letters, which in all ages has sprung to 
the succor and defence of genius, I summon it to act the part 
of honor and duty upon a wrong which, done to a single mem- 
ber of the great confraternity of literature, is done to all, and 
which flings insult and menace upon every immortal page that 
dares transcend the wicked heart or the constricted hrain. I 
send this letter to Yictor Hugo, for its passport through Europe ; 
I send it to John Stuart Mill, to ISTewman, and Matthew Arnold, 
for England ; I send it to Emerson and Wendell Phillips ; to 
Charles Sumner ; to every Senator and Representative in Con- 
gress ; to all our journalists ; to the whole American people ; 
to every one who guards the freedom of letters and the 
liberty of thought throughout the civilized world. God grant 
that not in vain upon this outrage do I invoke the judgment 
of the mighty spirit of literature, and the fires of every honest 
heart ! 

William Douglas O'Connor, 

Of Massachusetts. 



LBD14 



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